Chess Excellence

Good day, chess world! ♟️

Episode 9 of Capablanca's Chess Career in His Own Words is live: the defense episode.

Marshall against Capablanca, New York 1909, the eleventh game of the match. Marshall builds the attack of his life: queen and knight around the king, a passed pawn on d6, checks everywhere. Capablanca defends it and wins it, and the video turns his defense into a method you can copy: one question before every move, if my opponent had a free move, what would they do with it?

And there is a twist. In his own published notes to this game, Capablanca prints a line and calls it safe, and the engine grades it a forced loss. We refute his published analysis on camera with the checks, captures, threats drill, and Coach Nic makes the case that this exact flaw is what Alekhine found eighteen years later.

Watch the full lesson on the ChessExcellence channel, the link is in the first comment. Be honest with us afterwards: how honest is the analysis you write about your own games?

In the chess position rank the three candidates best to worst :

Good day, chess world! ♟️

The strangest win Capablanca ever published, and it starts with him losing. Berlin 1913, against the attacking master Jacques Mieses. Capablanca considers only two candidate moves at the critical moment, plays the one he analyzed the least, walks into a brilliant reply he never checked, and is materially lost by move 16. His own notes admit it.

Then comes the lesson, and it comes from his opponent. Mieses is up the exchange against the best player alive, and everything he does from that moment is a manual of how NOT to convert a material advantage. The centrepiece: Capablanca, dead lost, offers a queen trade, knowing three things. White's best piece is the queen. The endgame favours the better endgame player, himself. And Mieses loathed trading queens. Mieses refuses, and from that single decision the game slides downhill until Capablanca's passed pawn and mating attack finish it. His annotation on the refusal reads like a verdict: from this point the game gradually improves for Black until, with the exchange ahead, White is lost.

Inside the lesson: the two questions that decide every conversion, the king safety rule behind every queen trade decision, the three candidates rule Capablanca broke AGAIN, and the principle he left us at the end, that the most effective move beats the prettiest one every time.

Watch the full lesson, link in the first comment. Then answer me under this post: you are up material and your opponent offers a queen trade. What do you check before deciding? I read every answer.

Good day, chess world! ♟️

In 1914 the two greatest players alive sat down in St. Petersburg, and the older one won the game before a single pawn moved.

Emanuel Lasker, world champion for two decades, mathematician, philosopher, friend of Einstein, had noticed something about young Capablanca that day: he was content to draw. So Lasker chose the Exchange Ruy Lopez, the one opening where a draw mindset slowly strangles you, gave up the bishop pair, traded queens, and let Capablanca sleepwalk into a structure where only active play survives. Capablanca's own published notes are the confession: he played one move "against my better judgment," admitted "it is a curious but true fact that I did not see this move" about a knight jump he missed three moves into his own calculation, and then, already worse, wrote the immortal words "suddenly I became ambitious." Too late. The knight became a monster, the bishop died behind its own pawns, and a beautiful pawn sacrifice ended the argument.

The lesson I drill from this game: never play for a draw, and play the man as well as the board. Ask what your opponent hates, and serve it every move.

Watch the full lesson, link in the first comment. Then answer me under this post: when you face someone you know well, do you choose your opening for the board, or for the person?

Good day, chess world! ♟️

Here is a invaluable lesson, taught on a chessboard in 1913.

A weak king is debt. You may not be paying interest right now, but the obligation exists, and eventually it comes due. Capablanca, playing White against Znosko-Borowski, wrecked his own queenside pawns, castled straight behind the wreckage, and wrote in his book that the king was safe because no attack was possible. For twenty moves he was right. Then the position opened, one rook invaded, and the bill arrived with checks attached. Fourth game of his own book, fourth straight loss, and the first one with the White pieces.

My favourite part of making this lesson: even AFTER the game, writing his analysis for the book, Capablanca kept offering only two candidate moves at every turn, and missed the two most beautiful resources in the position, including a queen move that turns promotion into checkmate. The flaw that lost the game followed him into print. That is why I drill the Rule of Three with every student: three candidates for you, three for your opponent, every sharp position.

Watch the full lesson, link in the first comment. Then answer me honestly under this post: what is the debt in YOUR games, the weakness you have stopped counting because nobody has attacked it yet? I read every answer.

Good day, chess world! ♟️
Here is a claim for your day: there is one thing YOU can do better than the great Capablanca, and you can start today.

Havana, 1913. Capablanca, the man who lost only 6 percent of his games in his entire career, sits down against David Janowski and breaks the number one rule of chess. His king never gets castled. One quiet knight retreat on move 8 seals it, and for the next 28 moves Janowski hunts that king across the board: the same pawn lever cracking the shelter three times, check after check, until two connected passed pawns end it.

The part I enjoyed most while making this lesson: Capablanca annotated this loss in his own book, and two of his own claims collapsed when I put them to the engine. "Perfectly safe," he wrote about one defensive line. No, Capa. That is fake news. The engine sided with me over a world champion, twice, and I show you exactly where.
Watch the full lesson, link in the first comment. Then tell me under this post: what is your personal rule for when castling stops being optional? I read every answer.

What would you do here as Black ?

Capablanca Had Terrible Calculation Structure
Here is a claim that will annoy a lot of chess fans, and I can prove it.

José Raúl Capablanca lost only 6 percent of his games across his entire career. Kasparov named him one of only four players in history who could look at a position and simply know the best move, by feel alone, no calculation required. He is the closest thing chess has ever had to a natural genius.
And that gift was also his single greatest weakness.
A player who never has to calculate never builds a structure for calculating. So when the board turned sharp, with checks and captures flying, Capablanca had no method. He guessed. And his own notes give him away.
At San Sebastian in 1911, Akiba Rubinstein, the finest player never to become world champion, steered Capablanca into exactly the kind of forcing position he could not handle, and played a beautiful combination. In the critical position, the best move for Black was a check, Bxf2. It appears nowhere in Capablanca's analysis of the game. Not as the main line, not as a footnote, not even as a move he rejected. It simply did not exist to him.
That is not bad luck. That is the absence of a method.
This is the game that taught both Alekhine and Botvinnik how to beat the unbeatable: force Capablanca into positions where only cold calculation will do, and he falls. The greatest natural talent in history had precisely one crack in the armor, and this is the game that exposed it.
So in the new lesson I rebuild the exact structure he was missing:
♟️ Find the forcing moves first: checks, then captures, then simple threats.
♟️ Test each for viability, then prune the dead branches (Dvoretsky's word).
♟️ Pick three candidates, no more, and start with the most forcing one.
♟️ Run the same search for your opponent's replies, not just your own.
Capablanca could not teach you this, because he never needed it himself. But you are not Capablanca, and neither am I, and that is exactly why a structure will win you more games than talent ever will.

Free study notes for the game are in the description.

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